Vampire®: The Masquerade - Bloodlines™

I love this game especially for its story, setting, atmosphere and memorable characters. All the dialogs are fully voice acted and you can tell that they put a lot of effort into it. Perhaps because the character development system and the disciplines (spells and abilities) are based on a pen and paper role playing game of the same name it is really creative and distinct from other games. For me the graphics are still beautiful. Especially the facial expressions are very well done even by today's standards. Their reactions really add to the conversations you have plenty of throughout the game. There are a lot of dialogues but it never feels exhausting or boring to read them. The only criticism I have is that there are abilities that are clear winners over others. I am not even talking about spells (disciplines), because in theory I think you could complete the game without even using them. But abilities like lockpicking, hacking and persuation are essential for every character. Sneaking also can break the game and combat. With a high enough level it seems to be impossible for the enemy to detect you. Furthermore some abilities feel really useless in comparison to alternatives (intimidation vs. persuation for example). And melee based combat seems to be way better than the use of guns. In the beginning ranged combat feels kinda clumsy and ineffective. For one or two playthroughs this game has a lot to offer. But after that you feel that the story does not seem to change much aside from some dialogue and character builds do not vary enough to justify doing another playthrough with a different clan. My recomendation would be to pick whatever you like except Malkavian or Nosferatu for the first playthrough. And then for the second go with Malkavian, because the dialogue and insight is really fun. Apart from that it is still 5/5. There really isn't an RPG with similar setting and atmosphere out there. It's just excellent!

If you can get past some of the dated aspects of the game, you'll find a great experience awaiting you. Great writing, intriguing characters, and a multitude of approaches to how you handle events and interactions.

VTMB has the best atmosphere in games like it, the city streets are all unique and a breath of fresh air (I really liked Hollywood), it's almost hard to believe this is running on the same engine that Half-Life 2 is on, the dialogue is also really well written, which is always a plus. Only thing that kind of bugged me was the janky combat and the balancing for it, especially in the late game, which gets you killed if you forget to bring lots of supplies, the skill tree is a deciding factor if you live or die and you have to choose a class to use most of the time and stick with it (Guns, Melee or your special abilities) otherwise you'll be weak in the late game. It's also still quite buggy but most bugs can be fixed easily using the console or in the case of the AI pathing bug, you just have to remove all .ain files from /maps/graphs to fix this.

Kinda, undeniably unique game, theres nothing like this out there afaik. Has lots replayability.

Playing in 20 years after release I was surprised how much this held up. Atmosphere, music and some of the social aspects are extremely great, you even have solid dialogue animations for most NPCs. The first third of playing this game I was floored and surprised that there have been very limited spiritual successors... Then you get into level 3/5 of the Hollywood Sewers and its still going. Combat is bad and most of the boss battles are as well. Starts to show issues at around the half-way point and the last few hours are just dungeon after dungeon with little to no respect for the levels you put into social skills or your decisions that were so rewarding in the first parts of the game. Some characters are great, others just jiggle at you in a pandering way that shows its age slightly. Overall I still liked this game with its warts and I am starting to think that the upcoming sequel cant tarnish this game as much as it did itself. Even just ending slides would have improved quite a bit on this. Its on sale often enough that if you have a fairly quiet week you can beat the game in about 25 hours and have fun during most of it. If nothing else it will make you look for a World of Darkness tabletop group to join as the setting is extremely rich.